World Peace Movement

Advocating for world peace was the central focus of Violet Oakley’s life and art for more than fifty years. She was part of an international feminist movement in the early twentieth century to eliminate war through arbitration and disarmament. In 1889, Austrian-Bohemian countess and journalist Bertha von Suttner had inspired a peace movement with her German novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), which was translated into Italian, Spanish, and English. In 1905, von Suttner became the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Feminists were united in their belief that women’s maternal function gave them a moral imperative to oppose war as a political solution. On August 29, 1914, less than a month after World War I began, suffragist Fanny Garrison Villard, the daughter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, organized the Woman’s Peace Parade in New York City, the first protest against the European hostilities. On January 10, 1915, three thousand feminists converged on Washington DC and established the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP) with social reformer Jane Addams as chair. In April 1915, Addams and other members of the WPP attended the International Congress of Women at The Hague, Netherlands, to demand an end to the war. Addams was a member of the Quaker faith, one of the historic peace churches, along with the Mennonites and Church of the Brethren, who were Christian pacifists. An admirer of Addams, Oakley made several portrait drawings of her and a wrote a “dramatic outline” of her life called Cathedral of Compassion.

Oakley became a pacifist while studying the history of the Quakers and the life of William Penn in preparation for her murals in the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg. Penn’s “Holy Experiment,” his refusal to establish a militia in his American colony or sanction armed aggression toward the native people in 1683, and his plan for a Parliament of Nations to prevent war in 1693, became the subject of Oakley’s murals in the Senate Chamber. She circulated Penn’s beliefs in her illustrated folio The Holy Experiment, which she had translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese. In the 1920s, she gave copies of the folio to President Woodrow Wilson, President Warren G. Harding, and Mohandas Gandhi, the pacifist leader of the Indian independence movement. In the Supreme Court Chamber, Oakley devoted murals to the International Court of The Hague and Disarmament. She continued to advocate for international government in a second folio, Law Triumphant, which included portraits she made of the delegates to the League of Nations in Geneva. After World War II, Oakley was commissioned by the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin to draw the delegates to the newly formed United Nations. She continued to document the international community of peacemakers at the Moral Re-Armament Conference in Caux, Switzerland, in the late 1940s and Mackinac Island, Michigan, in the 1950s.